Steven Cooke Poet Free verse

The Boy of Silence

The face behind the harlequins gaze
hides the scars of yesterdays man.
Born in an  Attercliffe slum
in the rags of fathers graft,
with a pencil for a voice
stolen from milk mans note.

A boy  in possession of an imagination
and no future
Who can still see a glimmer in the rust 
buried in the abandoned steel works,
lost in  council’s regeneration
of a green field sites that now offers
the quest for a four leaf clover.

This gift can be a lonely thing
in a world of regimented minds.
Inspiration needs a partner
for every word is a journey.
Writing belongs to my addiction 
and my love 
for the glorious water of Scotland.

For a single malt can make a man hear 
the ghosts from the past.
The fear of being the scruffiest lad at school
leaves a generals memory of war 
bullies and a pregnant girls shame.


A school is a flag that I shall not pass
for its contents means nothing to me.
The wood that that lost its view
to the Stalag of  tomorrow’s drones
Can only cry in silence.

But I who was born in its shadow
found solitude and my fortress
Inside a tent of twigs
in a cold uncaring world.

My soul could never connect with
the wage packet teachers
who are as forgetful as me.

The boy who found his dreams 
In the cover of the oak.
Whose presence still remembers
the torn book of Sassoon
thrown  into  the brambles discarded,
 as the generation within it was.

I am the voice whose audience was the wood 
and applause came from imagination,
though the spirits of the past looked on.
The immortality of silence
is only a pretender.
For it shouts within my soul of past memories,
Of a  ghost  I do not know
existing in the denial of god.
 
A being that time cannot touch.
 And long after I am dead ,
the wind will carry this immortal  feather
and in its dance a ghost will be seen.
Looking for a stolen pencil
and a torn book that nobody reads.

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